Editorial

Don’t count on the United States to be politically prudent in dealing with other nations of the world at any level. Maintaining hegemony, the American ruling-elite feels, is accomplished best not through overly caution or moderating discussion, but through a strong, unrelenting campaign of discrete belligerence: showing your teeth but holding your bite.

Israel's economy minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of the right-wing party "The Jewish Home", published an article in the New York Times in which he buried the concept of a "two-state solution" as a way out of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Bennett does not belong to the radical Zionist fringe. Although he is an advocate of extremist colonial Zionist ideas, he is considered to be the successor of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. In his Op-ED, Bennett has made a mockery of the policy of the last 20 years, which was connected to the Oslo Accords and the two-state solution. His words won't bear fruit right now, but they might be in the future.

An intractable process, one that never seems to resolve itself, is either no process at all or a fraudulent one contrived to hide an ulterior motive. The so-called Israeli-Palestinian (at one time the Israeli-Arab) “peace process,” now in its sixth decade (counting from 1948) or fourth decade (counting from 1967) is, and probably always has been, just such a fraud.

Mid-term elections are over, and the anticipated trouncing of Democrats in Congress took place without a hitch, even if the media selfishly played the uncertainty card. The sad reality: the United States is a nation divided alongside economic lines of haves and have-nots, and not ideology… with the leadership of both parties finding common ground in a solitary, non-domestic issue: the maintenance and perpetuation of the empire. And, that’s the only political preserver this drowning, unpopular president, Barack Obama, can hang on to for what is sure to be a political legacy which cultivated mediocrity, totally lacking backbone and leadership

Imbedded in Sir Thomas Beecham’s observation is an assumption, if you will, that civilizations advance, that humankind progresses in time to higher levels of intelligence as we shed ancient superstitions that locked our ancestors into barbaric acts, that our creativeness in application of scientific knowledge improves the human condition, perhaps even, that as time passes, we grasp the one underlying reality of human advancement that will truly fulfill that assumption, all are one in a shared universe or we all are doomed.